What is the future of timber in cities?
Project timeline: 1 month
URBAN LATTICE located in the lower east side of Manhattan is designed as a catalyst for timber structures in an urban context that where the dimensional quality of timber is the driver of design, both in aesthetics and function, embracing its limits and potential.
Over the years, rapid development on the Lower East Side of Manhattan has resulted in aggressive gentrification of spaces with the lack of sensitivity to the local community. In unifying the public and private programs within the two given blocks, interweaving the different residential unit typologies, and creating semi-public and private spaces that engages the residents, museum go-ers, and Essex Market shoppers altogether; a new yet familiar space is created and given back to the existing community. The Essex Street Market and Andy Warhol Museum both calls for a large flow of temporary public visitors during the day, but what happens “after hours” when the shops are closed and the museum empties out? What will be the experience for the hundreds of residences that call this place home permanently? We wanted the project to carry a distinct life beyond the operating hours. Therefore, the existing Suffolk Street transforms into a pedestrian street accompanied by two Andy Warhol sculpture gardens that naturally lends itself to become more private “after hours”, like an internal courtyard for the residents. During the day, the Andy Warhol Museum Cafe, market stalls and eating spaces will spill out of the buildings onto the street. The auditorium is fully glazed on the pedestrian street side, inviting bypassers to fulfill their inner curiosity—stay for a good performance.
The expansive open floor plan on the ground floor, with a few interior load bearing CLT walls that act as columns, makes for a highly flexible and luxurious quality of space in the market, museum, and pedestrian street. With the intention of minimizing structural interferences on the ground floor, a hybrid structural system was strategized through structural redundancy for the residential units above allowing for three design elements to occur:
A structural lattice façade that allows customization of lighting in apartments, curating the amount of privacy by function.
A load bearing wall that transfers vertical load to the perimeter of the ground floor, creating rhythm for the façade on street level.
A point load CLT column system that transfers interior vertical loads between long span CLT beams, aiding the organization of programs on the ground floor.
Black Spruce and Port Orford Cedar, native to Quebec and Oregon, is selected for its light warm tones while celebrating the use of local sustainable materials in architecture. With emerging technologies to build taller, more sustainable timber structures, design plays a crucial role in the application of these materials, utilizing them to its full potential of aesthetics and function. Because of structural redundancy, the complexity of the timber lattice façade is juxtaposed with a fully glazed adjacent facade that reveals the timber interiors of the residential units—a warm glow emitting from the inside.
Final competition boards
